September 17, 2007, Evening The evening rush hour in New York can grind a person’s patience into dust.
I clutched the stack of cash I’d just received, squeezed my way out of The Daily Bugle building, and blended into the crowd of commuters heading toward the subway station, my face cold enough to frost over.
It wasn’t that the freelance job had gone wrong—on the contrary, the massive pile of’spaghetti code’ regarding manuscript management inside The Daily Bugle, which had been accumulating for nearly five years and had left several senior programmers scratching their heads, was completely cleared up after I sat in the breakroom with my laptop for two hours, along with patching over a dozen vulnerabilities that hackers could have exploited as backdoors.
The editor-in-chief responsible for coordinating with me was beaming, paid me the agreed-upon cash on the spot, and kept asking if I wanted to come work for the newspaper full-time as technical support.
Naturally, I made an excuse about “still being in school” and slipped away.
It wasn’t that the pay was low; it was just that this place was too conspicuous—who didn’t know that in the coming years, this would be the headquarters for Spider-Man’s number one hater?
It was probably still a while before Peter Parker would be bitten by that fateful spider, and I didn’t want to leave any traces here ahead of time; if I were ever dug up by The Daily Bugle along with Spider-Man in the future, I wouldn’t even have a place to cry.
What made my mood even worse was that, in order to finish the work today, I only had time to buy a turkey sandwich at the convenience store downstairs for lunch.
What kind of anti-human thing was that?
The dry bread was so hard it could chip a tooth, the lettuce inside was as wilted as if it had been sitting there for three days, the turkey meat was as tough as chewing cardboard, and it was slathered with sickeningly sweet mayonnaise.
I took two bites and threw it away, and even now, that strange sour taste lingered in my mouth, my stomach felt empty and anxious, and only one thought filled my mind: I want Chinese food.
Authentic, hot, stir-fried Chinese food.
In the four days I’ve been in New York, I’ve had enough of the torture of white people’s food.
Sandwiches, burgers, cold salads—it’s just the same few things over and over, and eating them makes me feel like my soul is about to turn into a lettuce leaf.
Come to think of it, this method of mine for making money is practically custom-made for who I am right now.
After all, for a super artificial intelligence like TB that can manipulate code at will, fixing spaghetti code for these small businesses and companies is as simple as drinking water.
I charge only half of what programmers on the market ask for, yet my efficiency is more than ten times faster; once the reputation spread, small companies came looking for me every day.
Of course, I only take cash jobs and absolutely refuse to use bank accounts—just kidding, not to mention the surveillance by S.H.I.E.L.D., the U.S.
“IRS” is even harder to deal with than HYDRA; if a large amount of unexplained funds suddenly appeared in my student account, I’d be invited for tea the very next day.
As for “sustainable overfishing,” that’s even more of my specialty.
Occasionally, I’ll cause some harmless, minor crashes in the systems of the companies that have sought me out—not the kind of fatal bugs that would cause them heavy losses, but just annoying little problems like occasional lag, mysteriously missing files, or printers that won’t connect to the internet.
They search everywhere for people to fix them but can’t, so they always end up remembering me, the cheap and easy-to-use “Chinese genius girl,” and after a few back-and-forths, I have a stable source of clients.
Just like today, in addition to the money for fixing the system at The Daily Bugle, I remotely handled small bugs for three other small companies; by the end of the day, I had nearly two hundred dollars in greenbacks in my pocket, enough for me to have a good meal.
The only trouble is this face.
Snow-white long hair reaching my waist, the few strands of blue highlights at the ends impossible to hide, plus these sea-blue eyes, and this nineteen-year-old (?) face that looks like an underdeveloped loli—no matter where I go, people stare.
When I was fixing the code at The Daily Bugle, the eyes of the male programmers around me never left me, and someone even came over to hit on me, asking if I was a high school student there for work experience; I kept a cold face the whole time and didn’t say a word except for necessary technical questions, only then did I manage to send them away.
Too conspicuous.
I pulled my hood up to cover most of my hair and squeezed into the subway station with my head down.
After getting on the train, I stood in the furthest corner, eyes cast down the whole time, while my mind subconsciously scanned the entire subway station’s monitoring system, silently wiping clean every frame that captured me.
I’ve become so proficient at this set of actions over the past few days that I don’t even need to think about it; the “program” in my brain completes it automatically.
I naturally attributed this to TB’s basic abilities, completely failing to notice that I hadn’t even actively connected to the surveillance network; those data points seemed to have a mind of their own, proactively clearing away any traces of me.
The subway rattled for nearly forty minutes before finally arriving at Chinatown.
The moment I stepped out of the subway station, the familiar Chinese signs rushed into my view, street vendors were hawking their wares in Cantonese-accented Chinese, and the air was filled with the aroma of soy sauce, chili, and hot oil; my shoulders, which had been tense all day, instantly relaxed.
I navigated the familiar route into a small alley and found a Cantonese restaurant that looked like it had been open for some years.
The shop wasn’t big, with seven or eight wooden tables, and an old-fashioned tube TV hanging on the wall was playing Chinese evening news; the owner was a middle-aged woman with a Cantonese accent who, seeing me enter, smiled and greeted me in Chinese: “Little girl, alone again?
The usual?” “Yeah!
One serving of fish-flavored shredded pork on rice, and an iced cola.” I blurted out, finding a corner seat against the wall; this position allowed me to see the entire shop, and with a wall at my back, I didn’t have to worry about anyone staring at me from behind—it perfectly met my safety criteria.
“Alright, the usual, one moment!” The owner turned and went into the back kitchen, and soon the sizzling sound of a wok stir-frying came through; the familiar smell of “wok hei” wafted over, and I felt my stomach growling.
There weren’t many people in the shop; apart from me, there were only two tables of customers—one was a pair of middle-aged men traveling, speaking in a Northeastern dialect, and the other was a young couple eating quietly—no one noticed me in the corner.
I let out a sigh of relief, took off my hoodie, and casually placed my old wallet containing the cash on the edge of the table.